duke_aldhein (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} duke_aldhein) wrote,@ 2006-01-22 18:00:00 |
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'the economist' backs people power - up to a point...
Tom points out this (pay-walled) article from the Economist about the virtues of people power:
There's a telling sympathy-gap between references to leftwing movements in South America and the role of US government-funded agencies in destabilising other regimes:
Those who hold structural power today always claim the mantle of those who fought to change yesterday's structures: this has the effect of delegitimizing those who fight to change today's structures. By representing other countries as our backward cousins, trailing behind us on the grand march of history, their struggles are incorporated in the same way to legitimize our status quo. The problem is, it's always in the interests of those who hold structural power to claim that our current structures represent the end of history. In a sense, this is true - in the limited sense that these structures represent the end of the line for those who are inseperably bound up with them. But history is unconcerned and will no more arrest itself for this lot than any of their predecessors:
Tom points out this (pay-walled) article from the Economist about the virtues of people power:
All the evidence is that people power, if it is to bring about a lasting change that increases freedom, must bubble up from below. It must be indigenous, broad-based and, ideally, non-violent.It's certainly a shift from the belief that military intervention could trigger a domino effect. But it relies on a Fukuyama-ish certainty that 'people power' could never trouble regimes that think of themselves as democratic, as opposed to Islamic hierocracies.
There's a telling sympathy-gap between references to leftwing movements in South America and the role of US government-funded agencies in destabilising other regimes:
Don't even assume that popular revolutions are always for the good. Some can be bad from the start. In Bolivia, for example, mass uprisings have tended to look rather like mob rule... [It] does now have a ruler, Evo Morales, who has been properly elected in a fair election, so the nationalist, left-wing policies of the protesters have won a retrospective endorsement. But that hardly excuses the earlier uprisings.The article's litany of popular movements for democracy includes 'the noisy clattering of pots and pans in Chile in 1983 that sounded the beginning of the end for Augusto Pinochet', but America's role in his rise to power goes unmentioned.
[...]
America has groups such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the Middle East Partnership Initiative and the National Democratic Institute, all financed by the government... The trouble is that, try as they may to present themselves as neutral agents removed from government--the National Endowment for Democracy often describes its activities as "technical assistance"--they are usually seen as arms of the CIA or its equivalent.
Those who hold structural power today always claim the mantle of those who fought to change yesterday's structures: this has the effect of delegitimizing those who fight to change today's structures. By representing other countries as our backward cousins, trailing behind us on the grand march of history, their struggles are incorporated in the same way to legitimize our status quo. The problem is, it's always in the interests of those who hold structural power to claim that our current structures represent the end of history. In a sense, this is true - in the limited sense that these structures represent the end of the line for those who are inseperably bound up with them. But history is unconcerned and will no more arrest itself for this lot than any of their predecessors:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
To whom then will ye liken God? or what likeness will ye compare unto him...?
It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
That bringeth the princes to nothing; he maketh the judges of the earth as vanity.
Yea, they shall not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown: yea, their stock shall not take root in the earth...
Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard, that the everlasting God, the LORD, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary? there is no searching of his understanding.
He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.
Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall:
But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.
